The disclosures herein relate generally to information handling systems (IHS's) and more particularly to IHS's including media drives.
As the value and use of information continue to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system (IHS) generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
IHS's often include media drives such as CD and DVD drives for reading and writing information on removable media. These drives are often used to pre-master content. Pre-mastering is a process that takes source data and creates a disk in the desired format, for example, CD or DVD format. One prerequisite of pre-mastering is uninterrupted recording. Media drives typically include buffers to lessen the likelihood that the data stream to the drive will be interrupted. However, even with large buffers, it is possible that the buffer will run out of data and a buffer underrun will occur. When such a buffer underrun occurred in older drives, the disk medium was rendered useless after the underrun and interruption in writing data to the disk medium.
One attempt to lessen the impact of buffer underrun during recording is to monitor the amount of data in the buffer. When the amount of data in the buffer becomes less that a predetermined amount, the drive writes a link on the disk medium and waits. The link is interpreted as an error block. When the buffer is refilled to an appropriate level, the drive starts recording after the error block or link. More advanced drives without linking are now available that enable a resumption of recording at the location on the disk medium where the interruption occurred.
Portable battery powered IHS's encounter another problem when recording to a disk medium. More particularly, problems occur when the IHS encounters a low power condition such as a critical battery warning at the same time the IHS is writing information to the media drive. If the recording is not completed before the battery runs out of energy, the IHS will force a shutdown. In that event the recording will terminate prematurely and the disk medium in the drive is rendered useless.
What is needed is an IHS which addresses the media drive problems discussed above.